


respite

by limerental



Category: Wiedźmin | The Witcher - All Media Types
Genre: Character Study, Dom Yennefer of Vengerberg, F/M, Femdom, Light Dom/sub, Mentioned Jaskier/Every Witcher, Non-Sexual Submission
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-09-16
Updated: 2020-09-16
Packaged: 2021-03-06 19:07:58
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,853
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26493874
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/limerental/pseuds/limerental
Summary: Vesemir is old. Yennefer allows him small moments of rest.
Relationships: Yennefer z Vengerbergu | Yennefer of Vengerberg/Vesemir
Comments: 18
Kudos: 68





	respite

**Author's Note:**

> this was conceived as a joke about how all these Kaer Morhen orgy fics vaguely reference Vesemir and sometimes Yen in the background and then I thought a little too hard about it and it's real now you are welcome

Vesemir is old.

He was long ago made shrewd and careful enough to measure out the sum of life’s mysteries, cataloguing and figuring and exacting. He knows the lot of it. There are no truths left to unearth, or at least not any worth unearthing. Leave it for some young creature. Leave him here in this wreck of a mountain keep to wile away his time until the last days.

He is old. He is stuck on the same dirt track carved by the rut of wagon wheels. He is unchanged and unbothered, and the world that changes around him does not change in lasting ways.

The winters always come. The frost heaves off the mountains and sloughs through streams into spring. Dawn spreads its orange touch over the peaks after every long night. The moon’s face yawns and is devoured and is un-devoured again.

He is old.

Too old, certainly, to be overhearing such revelry and cavorting occurring somewhere in the depths of the keep. The winters that the human bard chooses to spend here are always raucous and lively and crackling with energy. The young ones shiver and gnash their teeth with restless tension as the daylight shrinks and the ice crusts over the window panes. Untoward fraternizing is as inevitable as it always has been, but the bard tips the scales toward raunchy, mindless rutting far earlier in the season than Vesemir can stomach.

He leaves them to it. Wrinkles his nose and paces the pitch-black corridors on the outer edges of the keep. These places have given to time, sagging and molding and crumbling, allowing the winter air to hiss in through the cracks and slumps. Skin numb as a statue, he hardly feels the cold. A witcher can endure sub-zero temperatures almost indefinitely, sluggish heart rate dragging slower, body frigid and corpse-like.

An ornate door looms along a frost-whitened hallway.

She invites herself, most winters. Slips in through the cracks. Appears as a shadow without fanfare, an unfamiliar door appearing at the end of a familiar hallway. She is firstly here for Geralt, he knows, and she is only half here, the doorway opening to anywhere she pleases.

Tonight, it opens for him.

Vesemir steps through into a room decidedly beyond Kaer Morhen, lavishly furnished with hearth ablaze with light. He spies her at once, the witch reclined in a shift of black and white, a tome cracked open in her lap.

“Don’t let the cold in,” she says without looking up, her delicate fingers poised on the page.

He knows that she could breathe the room warmer with a word.

He stands a while simply looking, one hand on the door he has shut behind him. The doorknob is limned in frost. At the foot of her chair, a plush, square pillow sits on the floor. She does not look up at him.

Vesemir has thought there were no mysteries yet to unearth, and yet, here is another. He crosses the room with limping stride and kneels with a groan of creaking joints at her feet.

He is old.

He had thought he had reached the pinnacle of age and wisdom until the day when Kaer Morhen blackened to rubble, and then, the match had struck and the keep had rattled with screams and the children had died. He had buried himself in the dead to survive, clinging to the cooling flesh of his brothers.

Afterward, he thought, yes, this is the sum of all knowledge in the world. The days break and split over the mountains, and the tides fall and rise on and on, on and on, even if no one of any worth is there to see it. The old Witcher will remain in the keep, on and on, and he will learn no new thing that wasn’t learned that night. There are no mysteries. There is only the numbness and the stillness and the quiet.

Yennefer looms above him, indifferent and shadowed.

Vesemir kneels for hours. He ducks his head and folds his hands in his lap and kneels but does not slip into the typical meditative trance, simply allows himself to feel the settling of his bones, the thrum of his heartbeat. She is a solid presence in the corner of his eye, and though he does not look at her, he can hear the whisper of pages turning every now and then, the quiet sigh of her breath.

When her hand at last alights on the crown of his head, it is the same as an electric current through his body. He presses involuntarily into the touch and then remembers himself and shrinks back, but she follows him. Her hand is cool and small and dark.

He is old.

He has known lovers in every sense and then some, but these days, his body, numbed by the Trials and then by age, responds slowly, if at all. Even the young ones, today lost in their lascivious revelry, will one day experience the same. Bodily hunger or need is not why he comes here. Desire of that sort has long cooled in him.

Vesemir comes to Yennefer for something different.

“Stand,” she says into the silence, her voice liquid down his spine. “Stoke the fire. And bring the bottle from the mantle. Pour me a drink.”

He obeys, muscles straining half-asleep as he rises but unfolding into steps that barely shuffle. He feels and does not feel the distant agony of a joint grinding in a socket, a muscle quivering on the edge of atrophy. He does not allow himself to feel the tells of age, able to shelve those pains and annoyances for some later date.

He is a Witcher, body molded out of clay and fired in the kiln so many years past that he does not remember boyhood. The day that he cannot rise to his feet from the hard ground is the day that he goes out armorless and empty-fisted to meet the next howling beast who dares challenge him. He hopes only to bring the beast down with him. He is the oldest Witcher alive in the world. He is old.

Vesemir stokes the fire, though Yennefer could have done it with a wave of her hand and selects the crystal bottle of spirits from above the fire, neck fisted in his grasp. A glass appears in Yennefer’s palm, rounded to the shape of it, and he unstoppers the bottle and spills amber liquid into her hand.

She does not offer him a glass. The smell of the whiskey is pungent and heady. Vesemir can smell the summer breeze over a barley field in Redania and the humus-rich dark of a forest in Verden that once counted among its numbers the mighty oak felled for the cask.

Of Yennefer, he can smell nothing but spring lilacs and that tart skin of gooseberries, all other scents and tells masked. Any other woman, he could read in the sweat on her upper lip her every desire and fear, centuries of extrapolation and study lending themselves to identifying the minor adrenal shifts and secretions by scent alone. The body is but a tangle of hormones and reactions and counter-reactions, easily parsed out.

But not her.

Her eyes are flat and blank, the color of a starling’s breast. She looks at him as one would a disheveled hunting dog who has wandered in from the cold uninvited. Disdainful of him but pitying, willing to offer him shelter a while.

This he can only guess at by the micro-shifts in her expression, but he knows that too may be a mask.

“Kneel,” she says, voice as heady as the whiskey, the single word lighting along his frayed nerve endings like a flame.

Vesemir kneels at her feet and bows his head forward. She tangles her fingers through his hair, stroking as if he really were a wayward pet, and he is thinking back suddenly to the last time he washed his hair. There is not much need or sufficient warmth for it in the coldest months, a lukewarm pail over the fire and a damp rag the most grooming any in the keep do through the clutch of winter, and his hair is lengthened and tangled.

She pats him as she would a mangy stableyard creature, fingers catching in the knotted strands of hair. She has the will and power to summon up a bubbling bath fit for a king’s chamber or simply the will and power to flick her wrist and wish the body clean and fresh-scented.

She has the will and power to crush him cupped in her hands. That is why he comes. He wears borrowed authority like a cloak, poorly-fitted, seams fraying, but she wears it beneath the electric hum of her skin. It is her birthright, that power, that authority.

Before it all burned down, Vesemir only knew the left right shift parry again again of teaching slender boys how not to die. Following orders, obey, obey. His masters pressing each new boy into his care. Here is a new lamb to the slaughter. Here is a child you must mold into something with instincts. Teach him how to spin, duck, curl back against the unspooling of his innards. Obey and do not count the boys too closely. Here and there the numbers waver. Ducks in a line, one plucked here and one silenced there before their balls even dropped, before they had a chance to strike at more than straw and leather, before they had learned to stop echoing for their mothers in the night. Do not keep too exact a count. Obey.

Some nights it is only this, silence on and on and the touch of her small hand. It has been a year since he last kneeled here, the seasons sluicing into one another from thaw to mellow haze to the dark again.

Some nights it is more. A coaxing of his old bones to feel anything again, warm fingers pressed and held, the mantle of tightly-held control shrugged off in favor of subservience, obedience, loosening threads. She thumbs through his forgotten thoughts and desires as easily as the book laid open in her lap.

Some nights, Vesemir is not an old and haunted relic. Some nights, he alights and is remade.

“How are your wolves?” she asks, tapping a long fingernail against his skull.

“Rambunctious,” he says. “Full of lusty vigor.”

“The bard?” she asks with a snort of amusement, tightening her grip in his hair.

“Noisy as ever. Not a place in the keep to find peace and quiet.”

He sounds old as he speaks. He is old. No bitterness and no regret in his tone, only the sure, steady pressure of time. The young ones will understand some day. The ways that everything wanes and goes thin. Thin like the veins of the wrist, like the skin of the temple. Thin like the gaunt figure of the sorceress above him who time crests over like a wave and does not touch.

“You are lucky then,” she says, “that I am here.”

**Author's Note:**

> yen: i fucked ur dad shitlips  
> geralt: :(((((((


End file.
